1. RS Revenue share. You send a customer and you get a percentage of what that person spends.
    

2. CPA Cost Per Acquisition. A flat fee for introducing the customer.
    

3. Clicks. You get paid a few cents for sending a prospective customer to the company's site whether the customer buys something or not.

Being an affiliate or a partner to promote an online program can be as easy as a 1-2-3. You fill up a form and a second later, an affiliate code is generated and you are ready to go. But, not all affiliate programs are the same. Therefore, you have to ask questions first before you join any affiliate program. Do a little research about the choices of program that you intend to join into. Get some answers because they will be the deciding point of what you will be achieving later on.

Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. Others might require you to be a paid member to participate. However, the best affiliates are the ones who know the product well and the only way to know if the product is any good is to buy it.

Your choice of affiliate program should be capable of offering detailed stats. They should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site. Impressions are the number of times the banner or text link was viewed by a visitor of your site. A hit is the one clicking on the banner or text links. Some affiliate sites also pay you just for sending them a visitor. This is called being paid for clicks or hits. How much will you get paid? 5% - 20% is the commission paid by most programs. .01% - .05% is the amount paid for each hit or click.

You need to be confident on the program enough to track those people you refer from your site. This is the only way that you can get credit for a sale. The period of time that those people stay in the system is also important. This is because some visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. Many sites put tracking cookies, for example, on the visitor's computer. When the visitor returns the cookie is read and if they make a purchase this time it is still credited to you. Tracking cookies can be set to expire after a certain length of time. You need to find out how long that sales are credited to you.